Lightweight data exploration in Excel

This is such a good trick for spreadsheet user. Juice Analytics have a great trick on plotting graphs within the cell, by using the function REPT() to repeat a single bar character (”|”). They called it a In-cell bar graph:

What are some practical uses of in-cell bar graphs? For starters, they offer a good way to profile a dataset that has hundreds or thousands of rows. Here’s a picture of in-cell bars compared to a standard excel bar graph for a dataset with about 500 rows. It can be a lot easier to scan the results when they’re in-cell.

Another usage is lightweight dashboards. The report below compares a number of metrics for players using both in-cell bar graphs as well as conditional formatting. The conditional formatting highlights the top 25% of each metric in green and the bottom 25% in red but that is a story for another day.

Very practical – I am going to use it on my spreadsheets at work!

Lightweight data exploration in Excel – [Juice Analytics via ideaxidea]